


Don't Fear Your Reaper

by silverxrain



Series: Connect the Dots [3]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-24
Updated: 2015-05-28
Packaged: 2018-03-19 11:25:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 2,228
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3608352
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/silverxrain/pseuds/silverxrain
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean Winchester is a difficult charge for a reaper: he just won't stay dead. But Tessa is determined to protect and love her human, even when she has to watch him self-destruct.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Dean dreams.

It's a nightmare.

Hell. There's fire and brimstone, sure, but also blood pooling on the floor, the awful stink of sulphur and guts. His father's there in the middle of it, tied down and terrified, the white of his eyes showing, sweat glistening on his forehead, and demons, hundreds of demons laughing all around him with their black devil eyes.

Then there's a cool touch on his forehead, and the nightmare world is drawn away, as if someone had drawn the shutter over it.

He's lying on a soft bed, his body sinking into it, his mind weightless. There's dark hair brushing his face, and he hears the sound of a woman's voice singing. He can't make out the words, though his subconscious tells him it's probably Latin, or some other more ancient dead language.

He hadn't noticed, but suddenly the words have changed, English now, a familiar tune.

She's humming Blue Oyster Cult's 'Don't Fear the Reaper.'

The singing is driving the nightmares away. Dean tries to speak, but he's so tired and the pillow is so comfortable under his head and his muscles have no strength and his throat has no voice. "Shh, sleep now," she tells him in a voice like a forest stream. "There is no need to dream of Hell, Dean Winchester, the angels promised me that you are Heaven-bound." 

Dean would try to make sense of this, but the red-blood-sulphur nightmares have blown away like dust, and he can finally sleep, and why waste the opportunity. 


	2. Chapter 2

When he wakes up, the awful knowledge that his father is dead drives the woman from his mind instantly. The Hell-dream has already been wiped from his consciousness, but over time, Dean begins to suspect anyway that his father's death was not only by unnatural means but that it had been directly tied to his recovery. In fact, he was almost certain, after a week of subtly questioning Sam, who had not the heart to deny Dean a thing, what his father had been doing before he died, that he had made a deal.

A deal. For Dean's life.

His heart ached.

He would swear he could sense him, his father, with that tight knit thread always binding the three of them, that his father's soul wasn't resting. Dean knew he knew, and Sam knew, though he tried to deny it. Just like when Dean had known John wasn't dead, couldn't be, because Dean still felt it. The cord tugging on his heart, saying Daddy, Dad, please, come home, and home was wherever they were, wherever the Winchesters were together, that's all home had ever been to him.

Except now they weren't, and Dean might never be home again, because a third of them was gone, and now that was half the family that should have been his, by right gone, swallowed by elusive yellow eyes and crackling flames.

Dean felt like someone had sliced his chest open, cut out a piece of his heart and run away with it. Because half his heart was for John, and the other half for Sam, and a tiny corner where memories of being very young nestled, was for Mom, and that, Dean tried to hide away.

But he couldn't hide this. It was like he'd been ripped into pieces.

Christ, did it hurt.


	3. Chapter 3

Dean tried to avoid Sam the same way he tried to avoid mirrors, so as not to see the dead pain in his eyes reflected back at him. The first week was unbearable. Dean didn't shower or shave. He didn't remember eating, although he must have, as he didn't remember collapsing of hunger either. Sam might have force fed him something at some point, Dean wasn't sure. Food, air and whiskey alike all tasted like sandpaper.

They slouched around Bobby's house for the first week. Finding a hunt was out of the question. Doing anything other than drinking with bathroom breaks was out of the question. This was how hunters grieved. Whiskey and moping, closing their eyes against the visions in their head of a flames leaping over the pyre of a body they had once breathed the same air with and loved too hard.

It felt like a raw wound, three weeks later, when Sam insisted on prodding it.

"I'm just saying, maybe we should move out of Bobby's house. I'm sure - I'm sure he's got things to do. We're no good to anyone just waiting around here, and it won't help - it won't help anyone. It's not what Dad would have wanted us to do."

"The hell do you know about what Dad would want us to do? You never even cared what he wanted us to do."

"Dean, I-"

Dean ignores him, letting the bitter words flow like pus from a wound. "So now he's dead, now his word means something to you? Jeez, well it's good to know, Sammy, next time I want you to quit bitchin' and finally pay attention, all I gotta do is die!"

"Dean!"

Dean opens his mouth, takes a breath instead of talking. He looks at his brother.

Sam looks at him right back with those eyes like a forest in the fall. "Dean, I'm grieving too, you know," he says, and suddenly Dean feels terrible. He's been avoiding Sam all this time, ignoring every attempt of Sam's to jolt them out of this quagmire, forgetting entirely the pain his brother must be feeling, in favor of his own.

'I think Dad made a deal for me', he wants to say.

'Sam, I think it's my fault our father's dead.'

'Sam, I think I should have died, and he should have lived.'

'Sam, I'm not worth it. I'm not worth any of it.'

Instead, he says, "Let's leave tomorrow."


	4. Chapter 4

Dean dreams the Hell-dream a few more times, thrashing on his bed in the dingy motel room. Sam doesn't wake, he hasn't really slept since his father died, and he's too exhausted for his normal light sleep.

But that's okay, because Dean's not alone.

He jolts out of the brimstone and slick blood and spitting flames to see the peeling blue and white patterned painted ceiling of their room. Sam is in the other bed, their heaps of clothes pushed in the corner, everything's like it is when he's awake, except he knows he's not. He's woken from a dream into another dream. But this one has a soft glow around the edges, and it feels muted and familiar and peaceful. And then the dark haired girl comes, and sits down on his bed. He's too tired to move, or ask her anything, so he lies motionless while she hums Metallica. Once, she looks at him and says, "You're probably the only person I'll ever know who finds classic rock music soothing." Her eyes are green-hazel, ancient and knowing.

When Dean wakes up in the sunlit motel room, it feels for a moment as if someone's missing.

He looks around. Sam's still snoring in the other bed. Dad, is his next thought, but Dad hasn't been in Dean's periphery for a year, and his absence isn't obvious. Dean is accustomed to waking up without him now.

But it feels like he woke up, and someone who was there before has gone.

He shakes the feeling off, and gets out of bed to brush his teeth. Maybe it'll take the miserable look Sam has every morning off his face if Dean gets his coffee the way he likes it for once.


	5. Chapter 5

The whole year, he feels like something is missing. His conscious mind is certain it's Dad. Even when he isn't around, John is a huge presence in Dean's life and that holds true in death. Sam tries to deflect Dean's attention off himself by constantly asking about Dean, under the impression that 'talking about their feelings' will somehow make it better that their father is rotting in Hell where Dean should be instead.

He almost takes the deal. The crossroads demon is right there, offering him his father's life and a way to finally unburden himself of the crushing guilt, the awful feeling of love and loss and unbearable grief and accompanying self hatred he thinks must be worse than any torture. Maybe he won't even remember what it's like to hate the sight of himself if the demons are spreading his blood and guts over the floor in some choking hot, ash filled pit.

But Sam. It would kill Sam, and Dean can't do that to his little brother. Not when he knows what it would do to him if he had to live a day with Sam dead.

Dean stands just outside the devil's trap, and feels cool breath that smells like pine needles on the back of his neck. It's nothing to do with the crossroads demon, her powers are utterly bound, and she's watching him with expectant red eyes.

No, it's the dark haired girl. What dark haired girl? The brief image he had in his head slips away, and Dean resists the urge to shake his head like a dog shedding water. The smell and sensation is gone anyway, away with his brief entertaining of the idea of taking up the demon on her offer.

With the smell of pine needles and something woodsy blown away into the gasoline stink of the nearby highway, Dean feels a kind of loss ache in his side the way a stitch does. But he cannot put his finger on it.

 


	6. Chapter 6

"It's over for me. It doesn't have to be for you."

How stupid are you, little brother?

The second time Dean seriously considers death that year is now, locked in the room with his brother pleading for Dean to put a merciful bullet in his head, because some crazed bastard bled on him.

Dean knows how this must end before it begins. No. He simply will not be in this world without Sam. He just won't go on without his brother. Sam doesn't get it, of course, so Dean just leans against the counter.

"I'm tired, Sam," he says simply, which is true. His burden's wearing a furrow between his shoulders, and he's ready for it to end. There might be a somewhere, other than Hell, for them to go on to, but Dean doesn't care. Because he'll be going on with Sammy. And he can't, won't be alone in the awful, cruel world ever again. So in his book, it'll be just fine.

Dean feels the weight of someone beside him, the kind of prickling that accompanies the presence of someone else, but he and Sam are alone in the room, and his hunter instinct is telling him nothing. No evil spirit or creature is in here with him. Yet Dean can sense a warm weight beside him, and smells fresh pine needles and breath mints, those green ones his mother used to suck on all the time, but wouldn't let him have. The memory hits Dean suddenly and with force, like an unexpected shove. Nothing feels unnatural or out of place, rather, like an empty puzzle piece that makes up this scene is complete. Someone is leaning against the counter, thumbs hooked into their jeans' waistband just like him. She leans forward a little to whisper something in his ear that he doesn't catch, only feels her smooth hair brush his face.

They wait, in silence for three, four hours, and the presence waits with him. At the end of it, Dean is forced to accept nothing short of a miracle. It's as if a bullet heading straight for his head has suddenly lost all its force and simply dropped on the ground and rolled to a stop at his feet. It's stepping away from the edge of a precipice. It was so nearly all over, and he doesn't know whether he's relieved or disappointed. 

He's so reeling with emotions, staring at Sammy, him staring right back and breathing hard and panicky, but alive, that he doesn't notice something quietly slip out of the room.


	7. Chapter 7

Dean's thrashing, and trembling, and he doesn't think he's ever been so goddamn shaking with terror since he was sixteen and he'd disobeyed John and followed him into the woods and the werewolf gripped his wrists and shoved him against a tree in order to rip his throat out. Dean learned that day that listening closely to what his father said was the only way to stay safe in the world, and John said save Sammy, or kill him, and Dean hadn't done either, so maybe that was why Sam had left him and now Sam was gonna die. Dean hadn't listened to John's advice, didn't Sam know that whenever they screwed up it was because they hadn't been careful the way Dad would have been careful? Dad wouldn't have let himself get jumped, Dad would have told Sam sooner, Dad always knew exactly when Sam was about to crack, he knew when Sam needed a push, and when Sam was just whining for attention, Dad would have their back, Dad would save him, Dad would...  
Dad isn't here right now.  
Dad's gone and that crazy son of a bitch is gonna shoot my brother, then me, and no one will ever, ever know or give a shit that there are no Winchesters left at all.


End file.
